Oracle Open World Keynotes

OK. This is far to long for a blog post but there is a lot of information to communicate; so bear with me.

Whilst being unable to attend the most recent Oracle Open World Event due to a bike accident , I was able to listen to the keynotes live on the Internet as well as review the concurrent press releases and blog postings.

There was a lot of good information delivered through the speakers. Below are what I consider to be the highlights from OOW 2006.

Links to my summaries of the TOP 5 Keynote speeches
1. Phillips; OpenWorld Keynote Kickoff
2. Ellison Announces Enterprise-Class Support Program for Linux
3. Wookey Outlines Applications' Progress and Charts Their Future (includes Fusion demo)
4. Kurian Unveils Oracle WebCenter
5. Rowzat; Meeting the Business Intelligence Crisis with Oracle Technology

Other interesting topics
1. Identity Management
Links to Oracle Identity Management offerings
At Macerich we looked at Oracle Identity Management solutions earlier this year, including a set of presentations and demos. Clearly the solutions and functionality are a good fit with our requirements and future direction. Most of the components in this stack are comprised of software solutions acquired by Oracle over the past year. Given the number of projects currently under way it was decided to deal only with the Single-Sign-On component in 2006 and address other components at the end of Q1 2007. This would also give Oracle time to more seamlessly integrate these newly acquired products.

Over the course of the last 6 months I have posted a number of Identity Management related articles on my Macerich-Oracle blog. Here is a listing of those articles:
Synchronizing Oracle HRMS with OID
Password Management with OID
Using Third Party Identity Managers with EBusiness Suite 11i
Password Management with Third Party Solutions
Aliases Maiden Names and Nicknames
COREid, Thor, Xellerate and Others

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2. Ten Things You Can Do To Prepare for Fusion Applications

Although Fusion Applications are years away, there are many components of Fusion Middleware that are available today to help get us one step closer to Fusion Applications. The message from John Wookey, Cliff Godwin, Nadia Bendjedou, and others regarding Release 12, Fusion Middleware, and Fusion Applications remains consistent - we don’t need to wait for the release of Fusion Applications to start preparing for Fusion.

Moving to Fusion Applications will require new skills and experience to install, configure and support the new Applications Suite. However, many of the tools and technologies for Fusion Applications are available today and can be leveraged with 11i10 and/or Release 12, allowing us to get a head start on preparing our environment and staff for Fusion Apps.

Dr. Nadia Bendjedou’s session “Oracle E-Business Suite Customers: 10 Things You Can Do Now to Prepare for Oracle Fusion Applications” was still standing room only for some despite the fact the room held almost 500 people. There is obviously a lot of interest in Fusion, and the good news is we don’t have to wait years to start preparing today. Nadia’s presentation focused on both best practices as well as product components, and listed 10 items e-Business Suite customers should start focusing on now:

Dr. Bendjedou's Top 10 List

1. Rethink your customization strategy
2. Consider Master Data Management (MDM)
3. Move to SOA-based integration
4. Extend your business intelligence portfolio
5. Adopt enterprise reporting and publishing
6. Secure your global enterprise
7. Deploy grid computing
8. Centralize your lifecycle management
9. Upgrade to the e-Business Suite R12
10. Prepare a Fusion project plan

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1. Phillips; OpenWorld Keynote Kickoff

(5 min. audio summary)

Keynote Highlights - Real Media

Keynote Highlights - MP3

Oracle President Charles Phillips announced Oracle's business strategies for grid computing, Oracle Fusion Middleware, and applications. Mr. Phillips also discusses Oracle's acquisitions, Oracle Accelerate, and the enterprise software ownership experience (PDF).

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2. Ellison Announces Enterprise-Class Support Program for Linux

(5 min. audio summary)

Keynote Highlights - Real Media

Keynote Highlights - MP3

Addressing the largest crowd in Oracle OpenWorld history, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled Oracle Unbreakable Linux.
Link to brief summary of Mr. Ellison's keynote.
Quotes from Mr. Ellison's keynote:
- "Oracle's new Unbreakable Linux program will provide bug fixes to future, current, and back releases of Linux"
- "the new support program is available for all Linux users for as little as $99 per system per year; until January 31, 2007"
- "Oracle customers can get a free trial, and anyone can purchase support at a 50-percent discount"
- "..all you have to do is point your Red Hat server to the Oracle network; switching takes less than a minute"
- "We think it's important not to fragment the market, and we will maintain compatibility with Red Hat Linux,..we will resynchronize with their code"

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3. Wookey Outlines Applications' Progress and Charts Their Future

(5 min. audio summary)

Keynote Highlights - Real Media

Keynote Highlights - MP3

Link to brief summary of Mr. Wookey's keynote
Mr. Wookey reiterated Oracle's Applications Unlimited initiative. Mr. Ellison later stated that maintaining all of these Applications Suite was not a problem. Oracle could afford it as long as customers wanted it. He believes that within 10 years the demand for these legacy suites will have waned.
He also discussed the following topics:
a. The improved user experience within Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12
b. Four concepts that drive thinking about the next generation of Oracle applications:

- secure enterprise search, which is the new metaphor for navigating applications;

- XML-based reporting, which allows reports to be customized in countless ways;

- role-based analytics, a concept taken from Siebel products, which places business insight into the context of operational systems;

- sustainable integration, or connecting all products to one another and to third-party applications. To highlight this last point, he announced the creation of Oracle's Adaptive Business Solutions Group, which is dedicated to applications integration.

c. Oracle Fusion, its time line, and the four technologies that enable it:

- Web 2.0 concepts, such as desktop and collaboration tools;

- Service-oriented architecture (SOA), which gives businesses flexibility in how they develop and deliver business processes;

- Middleware, which orchestrates those processes;

- Standards, which provide Oracle, its partners, and its customers with common, shared tools for doing all of the above.

d. One of the biggest highlights of the entire Open World event for me was the demonstration which provided the first glimpse of Fusion Applications during Mr. Wooskey's keynote address. Jeremy Ashley from the Applications User Experience group walked through a scenario where a sales rep uses Fusion Apps to prepare a quote, ultimately leading to a closed sale. Here is a link to the screen shots from the demo.

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4. Kurian Unveils Oracle WebCenter

(4 min. audio summary)

Keynote Highlights - Real Media

Keynote Highlights - MP3

Link to summary of Mr. Kurian's keynote
Mr. Kurian discussed how Oracle WebCenter will provide a way to build sophisticated Web 2.0-based user interaction environments, and deliver task-oriented, contextual, multichannel interactions for users. "[Web 2.0] technologies are fundamentally changing how people interact with information on the Internet", he said. "WebCenter is used to streamline and automate tasks that involve jumping between different applications and tools that don't share content or context." The new set of tools, which is based on a service-oriented architecture, will enable companies to build applications that bring together data from various enterprise applications such as CRM, ERP, Microsoft Office desktop and mobile devices.

Kurian identified a number of other processes of Oracle Fusion Middleware's software:

- service-oriented development of applications

- business process management

- secure identity management

He also announced the next release of Oracle's open, standards-based suite of business intelligence products: Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition 10g Release 3

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5. Meeting the Business Intelligence Crisis with Oracle Technology

(5 min. audio summary)

Keynote Highlights - Real Media

Keynote Highlights - MP3

Link to Mr. Rozwat's Keynote summary
Chuck Rozwat announced Oracle Database 11g and its 482 new features. Rozwat also reviewed a cross section of Oracle technology that helps customers address the issues associated with getting a single view of information, customers, and suppliers, including Oracle Content Database 10g, Oracle Records Database 10g, Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g, and Oracle Audit Vault 10g, articulating how these products help companies' CIOs and IT directors manage content across the enterprise.

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2. Ellison Announces Enterprise-Class Support Program for Linux

Addressing the largest crowd in Oracle OpenWorld history, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled Oracle Unbreakable Linux, a new support program for Linux that provides the same enterprise-class support for Linux that Oracle provides for its database, middleware, and applications products.

"Currently, Red Hat only provides bug fixes for the latest version of its software. This often requires customers to upgrade to a new version of Linux software to get a bug fixed," explained Ellison. "Oracle's new Unbreakable Linux program will provide bug fixes to future, current, and back releases of Linux. In other words, Oracle will provide the same level of enterprise support for Linux as is available for other operating systems."

Better Support, Lower Cost

Oracle is offering its Unbreakable Linux program for substantially less than Red Hat currently charges for its best support. Ellison explained that the new support program is available for all Linux users for as little as $99 per system per year; until January 31, 2007, Oracle customers can get a free trial, and anyone can purchase support at a 50-percent discount. "This is all about broadening the success of Linux," added Ellison. "And to get Oracle support for Red Hat Linux, all you have to do is point your Red Hat server to the Oracle network; switching takes less than a minute."

Midway through his keynote, Ellison invited Edward Screven, Oracle chief corporate architect, and Wim Coekaerts, vice president of Linux engineering, to join him on stage.

"We think it's important not to fragment the market, and we will maintain compatibility with Red Hat Linux," said Screven. "Every time Red Hat distributes a new version, we will resynchronize with their code. All we add are bug fixes, which are immediately available to Red Hat and the rest of the community."

Coekaerts concurred. "We have many years of Linux engineering experience and an excellent technical team solely dedicated to Linux," said Coekaerts. "In fact, several Oracle employees are Linux mainline maintainers, and Oracle has a long history of contributing to the community." Oracle's breadth and depth of technical expertise, advanced support technologies, and global reach includes 7,000 support staff in 17 global support centers, providing help to Oracle customers in 27 languages, in any time zone.

Screven echoed Ellison's assertion that true enterprise-quality support for Linux at a lower cost is something that customers demand, and a long list of customers and partners have already endorsed Oracle's new Linux support program. Yahoo! Vice President of Engineering Laurie Mann took the keynote stage to share his company's enthusiasm for Oracle Unbreakable Linux. Mann explained that Yahoo!, which runs Oracle and Linux, is the most visited home page on the Web, so reliability and support are paramount. Oracle's enterprise-class support program addresses this demand head-on.

Many more customers and partners appeared via video on the massive screens in the keynote hall, including Dell, Intel, HP, IBM, Accenture, AMD, BearingPoint, EMC, BMC Software, Network Appliance, and many others. Toward the keynote conclusion, the audience was treated to Oracle's version of "The March of the Penguins," as several live penguins (accompanied by their professional trainers) waddled on stage.

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3. Wookey Outlines Applications' Progress and Charts Their Future

Now I know why security apparently worked extra-hard to keep aisles clear during the Wednesday morning keynote.

A few minutes into his talk, Oracle Senior Vice President John Wookey said, "Continuing our tradition of having sexy Italian companies present with me at Oracle Openworld, I'm very excited to introduce and welcome Ducati Motorcycles." A roar came from the back of the hall, and two gleaming Ducati bikes raced up the aisles and onto the stage.

Answering the question of why Ducati chose Oracle E-Business Suite, Giovanni Contino, Ducati Consulting CEO, joked that Oracle and Ducati have the same red color in their logos. But the real reason, he said, was that Oracle Applications adapted to his business. Contino then showed how Oracle E-Business Suite had helped Ducati become a "lean ride" and how the company had ridden Oracle-powered Lean processes to an International Best Factory Award (from the U.K.-based Cranfield School of Management) in just three years.

While the motorcycles were impressive, Oracle's Applications Unlimited initiative was the real high-powered machine in the room. Wookey reiterated Oracle's plans to support and enhance all of its application lines. "The commitment is very real," Wookey said. "We have dedicated development teams and dedicated leadership across product lines that are absolutely passionate about them, and passionate about working with customers to make sure we continually improve how we support you, how we continue to enhance the product with new features, and how we bring innovation and next-generation technology into those product lines."

Indeed, the needs and desires of customers drive Oracle's efforts in applications development. Wookey discussed the countless hours that Oracle applications teams have spent interviewing, surveying, and learning from customers in order to determine how they work and how—they want to work--and then plowed that information back into the applications.

Wookey also emphasized that major new releases are planned in all application product lines. "In fact, the new release of [JD Edwards] World is the first major functional release of the product since 1998," he pointed out.

Oracle's acquisition of applications companies has allowed it to take the best elements of each of its application lines and incorporate them into other applications. "We're bringing great intellectual property out of these product lines, across [to] other product lines, and into our next generation of applications," Wookey said.

Take, for example, the task-based user interface pioneered by Siebel. "It's a great idea, and something we think Siebel customers will be very excited about," Wookey said. "But we think it's something everyone can benefit from, so it's one of the design principles from a user-interface perspective that's actually getting architected into Fusion applications."

Wookey discussed the new Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12. Improvements include tailored installation scripts that customize upgrades that minimize upgrade interruption, and the application's improved user experience. "We've benefited from a lot of great [intellectual property] that's come into Oracle from PeopleSoft and Siebel," he said. "They had done a lot of great work on usability design, and we've actually taken advantage of that in all of our product lines, certainly in the [Oracle] E-Business Suite Release 12."

Turning an eye to the future, four concepts drive thinking about the next generation of Oracle applications, according to Wookey:

a. secure enterprise search, which is the new metaphor for navigating applications;

b. XML-based reporting, which allows reports to be customized in countless ways;

c. role-based analytics, a concept taken from Siebel products, which places business insight into the context of operational systems;

d. sustainable integration, or connecting all products to one another and to third-party applications. To highlight this last point, he announced the creation of Oracle's Adaptive Business Solutions Group, which is dedicated to applications integration.

Lastly, Wookey spent a few minutes discussing Oracle Fusion, its timeline, and the four technologies that enable it:

a. Web 2.0 concepts, such as desktop and collaboration tools;

b. service-oriented architecture (SOA), which gives businesses flexibility in how they develop and deliver business processes;

c. middleware, which orchestrates those processes;

d. standards, which provide Oracle, its partners, and its customers with common, shared tools for doing all of the above.

"That's what really brings the promise of SOA home," Wookey said, "the idea that there are accessible tools that we've used to build the system that you have equal access to."

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4. Kurian Unveils Oracle WebCenter

Heralding the first user interaction environment to break down the boundaries between Web-based portals, enterprise applications, and Web 2.0 technologies, Thomas Kurian, senior vice president of development for middleware platform products delivered his keynote address, called "The Middleware Revolution," at Oracle OpenWorld on Tuesday morning.

Kurian announced a new product of Oracle Fusion Middleware called Oracle WebCenter Suite, which will provide a way to build sophisticated Web 2.0-based user interaction environments, and deliver task-oriented, contextual, multichannel interactions for users.

"[Web 2.0] technologies are fundamentally changing how people interact with information on the Internet. We're bringing those technologies to you, the enterprise application community, and to people who want to build applications that use Web tool technologies within their corporate enterprise," said Kurian.

Customers can use WebCenter to streamline and automate tasks that involve jumping between different applications and tools that don't share content or context. WebCenter also creates a more dynamic, interactive work environment by deploying the new wave of Web 2.0 technologies, such as mashups, wikis, Voice over IP, RSS feeds, and discussion forums, across the enterprise.

The new set of tools, which is based on a service-oriented architecture, will enable companies to build applications that bring together data from various enterprise applications such as customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource management (ERP). Because it is hot-pluggable and based on open industry standards, users can also access this environment from other environments, such as Microsoft Office desktop and mobile devices.

"Only Oracle WebCenter Suite enables a superior user experience based on a full set of enterprise services that are pre-integrated and based on open industry standards," said Kurian.

Kurian identified a number of other processes of Oracle Fusion Middleware's software that companies can use to streamline business operations and improve information technology flexibility. These include service-oriented development of applications, business process management, and secure identity management.

He also announced the next release of Oracle's open, standards-based suite of business intelligence products: Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition 10g Release 3, which includes new components and improvements, allows for strategic integration with other Oracle products, and has expandable hot-pluggable support for third-party data sources and systems.

"Fusion Middleware has grown from virtually nothing in 2001 to over a billion dollars in just five years. Thirty-one thousand global companies use Fusion Middleware today," said Kurian. "The Internet continues to transform the architecture of enterprise applications. Fusion Middleware gives you the best middleware suite in the industry to exploit that transformation."

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5. Meeting the Business Intelligence Crisis with Oracle Technology

Chuck Rozwat, Oracle's executive vice president of Server Technologies, outlined Oracle's vision for its key technologies and provided some details on the company's product road map in a Monday morning keynote speech at Oracle OpenWorld, titled "The Information Road Map: What's Next?"

"We have a business intelligence crisis in the midst of our content data crisis," Rozwat told the crowd. "Most companies have a collection of different applications, so getting a single view of information, customers, and suppliers can be difficult."

In addition to the announcement of Oracle Database 11g and its 482 new features, Rozwat reviewed a cross section of Oracle technology that helps customers address those issues, including Oracle Content Database 10g, Oracle Records Database 10g, Oracle Secure Enterprise Search 10g, and Oracle Audit Vault 10g, articulating how these products help companies' CIOs and IT directors manage content across the enterprise.

In addition to listing Oracle's range of products, Rozwat discussed several of Oracle's recent acquisitions and how those companies' solutions bolster Oracle's technology road map. A representative from TimesTen helped to illustrate the point, explaining in a video presentation how TimesTen's real-time data caching solution works with Oracle Database.

A theme of Rozwat's keynote was the belief that evolving and expanding information requires businesses of all sizes to embrace a road map for managing important content and data in a secure, reliable, and cost-effective way. Oracle software, using advanced grid computing technology, adapts to a company's changing business needs, Rozwat emphasized.

"As data volumes increase, stress is being put on existing computing resources. The ability to scale is incredibly important, and you need an architecture that allows you to plug in more servers," said Rozwat. "Grid computing has grown over the years because of this."

Rozwat described the information explosion from both the demand side, which includes user demands and needs, and the supply side, examining how companies struggle to bring all this information to users in an integrated way.

"The amount of information that's being generated is truly incredible," he said. "However, the demands on how we use information can turn an asset into a liability. Oracle has new solutions to harness this information explosion."

Rozwat concluded by detailing Oracle's vision for its key technologies and outlining a specific strategy for the future of Oracle products, including Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle's development products, and Oracle Grid Computing.

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Oracle Identity Management: Best-in-Class. Application Centric. Hot-Pluggable.

Oracle Identity Management's best-in-class suite of IdM solutions delivers hot-pluggable middleware, allowing enterprises to manage the end-to-end life cycle of user identities across all enterprise resources both within and beyond the firewall. One can now deploy applications faster, apply the most granular protection to enterprise resources, automatically eliminate latent access privileges, and much more.

Oracle Identity management is leading the next wave of Identity Management with an Application-Centric approach.
Read more about best-in-class Oracle Identity Management solutions:

SINGLE SIGN-ON AND WEB ACCESS CONTROL

USER PROVISIONING

FEDERATED IDENTITY

DIRECTORY SERVICES

STRONG AUTHENTICATION

WEB SERVICES ACCESS CONTROL

ENTERPRISE SINGLE SIGN-ON SUITE

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Glimpse of Fusion Applications at Open World

One of the OpenWorld 2006 highlights for me was the first glimpse of Fusion Applications, profiled in John Wookey's keynote address.

Jeremy Ashley from the Applications User Experience group walked through a scenario where a sales rep uses Fusion Apps to prepare a quote, ultimately leading to a closed sale.

Here are some screenshots that show key aspects of what may end up as the Fusion user interface (click on the thumbnails to see the full-sized images). Of particular interest is the part of John's keynote video that describes this scenario, which begins at the 57:00 minute mark. This is the start of the scenario, showing the Oracle Fusion sidebar floating on the desktop:

This screenshot shows the prospect integrated into Outlook. Note the Fusion sidebar floating to the right of the desktop:

This next screenshot shows the sales rep checking on some high-level business background details prior to preparing a quote:

The following screenshot shows the sales rep preparing to use Google Docs to produce a quote using a prebuilt template:

This screenshot shows the prepared quote in Google Docs; note that the Oracle Fusion sidebar continues to provide new views of information that can be used in the quotation. Jeremy Ashley described the process of dragging and dropping objects from the sidebar into the quote, in true Web 2.0 fashion:

While preparing the quote, the sales rep drills into some detailed analytics for the customer's previous sales:

The next screenshot shows the customer remotely logged into Fusion Apps, while viewing the submitted quote. The customer is checking out the discount scale for the quote. Note the collaboration options in the Fusion sidebar:

The customer uses the instant messaging chat feature in the Fusion sidebar to negotiate on the quote's terms, and then closes the sale:

Getting the Full Picture

This summary doesn't do full justice to Jeremy's narrative flow, so it's worthwhile downloading the video of John's keynote if you want the full context. Warning: the Real Media version is a 150 MB download!

Related

• John Wookey's Keynote Address Video (Links to multiple media types)
  
• John Wookey's Keynote Presentation (PDF, 6 MB, includes screenshots)

JDeveloper / ADF Statement of Direction Document Published

Oracle published a new Statement of Direction: Strategy & Roadmap [pdf] document on OTN for Oracle JDeveloper and Oracle ADF. It provides high-level details on the key feature areas they are improving for the JDeveloper/ADF 11g "Fusion" release, the next major release of the tools and frameworks. Before this next major release, they plan to deliver routine maintenance release versions 10.1.3.1 and 10.1.3.2 as well (the former which is already available as a Developer Preview on OTN).

New Application Management Packs Coming for Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g

Oracle E-Business Suite Technology

New Application Management Packs Coming for Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g

The Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g team has just announced that a new set of Application Management Packs will soon be released for Oracle E-Business Suite.

For the E-Business Suite, this new Application Management Pack will support both Release 11i and 12. Some interesting new features:

• Automated discovery
• Service Level Management
• Out of box service models & beacon transactions
• Configuration Management
• Topology views
• Integration with Application Server & Database diagnostics
• Cloning automation for production to test environments
• Customized beacon for Forms components

A bit more information about the new application management, monitoring, and service level capabilities can be found here:

• Oracle Enterprise Manager
  

The official press release is characteristically light on specific release dates for the E-Business Suite Application Management Pack.

Related

• Oracle OpenWorld 2006 Application Management Previews
• Using Enterprise Manager with Applications Manager
• OAM: A Toolbox for E-Business Suite Administrators

Portal 10.1.4 Certified for the E-Business Suite

Portal 10.1.4 Certified for the E-Business Suite

It's taken a lot longer than expected, but Portal 10.1.4 has just been certified with the E-Business Suite Release 11i.

There are a number of interesting new features in Portal 10.1.4, including the Oracle Portlet Factory, JSR-168 and WSRP support, Struts support, BPEL integration, a new Instant Portal, and others.

The Portal 10.1.4 certification with the E-Business Suite requires the latest Oracle Applications Framework Web Provider, which might lead to other prerequisites such as Applications Technology Group (ATG) Family Pack H Rollup 4 (11i.ATG_PF.H RUP 4, Patch 4676589). Below is a list of relevant documentation.

References:

• Using Oracle Portal 10g with Oracle E-Business Suite 11i (Note 305918.1)
• In-Depth: Using Portal 10g with the E-Business Suite
• Upgrade To Version 10.1.4 (OTN)

COREid, Thor, Xellerate and Others

Earlier this year Oracle made a number of purchases in the identity management space. These have been rolled into the Oracle Identity and Access Management Suite of products. The obvious question probably occurs to you: can you use these with the E-Business Suite?

What's in Oracle Identity and Access Management?

First, it's important to be very clear about which products are included in this suite. These are:

• Oracle Single Sign-On & Oracle Internet Directory
  
• Oracle Access Manager (formerly Oblix COREid Access & Identity)
  
• Oracle Identity Federation (formerly Oblix COREid Federation)
  
• Oracle Identity Manager (formerly Thor Xellerate Identity Provisioning)
  
• Oracle Virtual Directory (formerly OctetString Virtual Directory Engine)
  

(the following products are have "special" licencing terms)

• Oracle Enterprise Single Sign-On (in partnership with Passlogix)
• Oracle Web Services Manager (formerly Oblix COREid Web Services Manager)
  

Supported with the E-Business Suite

All of the Oracle Identity and Access Management Suite products are supported for use with the E-Business Suite Release 11 and the upcoming Release 12. In other words, you may use all of the products above with E-Business Suite environments.

In addition, the E-Business Suite has special certified integrations with Oracle Single Sign-On and Oracle Internet Directory. The Applications Technology Group has produced specific documentation and patches for these configurations for E-Business Suite customers.

For an extensive discussion about the distinction between supported vs. certified configurations, see Certification & Support for Third-Party Products. Oracle supports more configurations than they actually certify.

Introduction to the Google Web Toolkit

Learn how to use the Google Web Toolkit to do everything from basic tasks to advanced ones such as RPC communication, history management, and packaging a production-ready application.

Web 2.0 and its technical counterpart, Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax), are gaining momentum thanks to applications such as Gmail and Google Maps. For Web applications, the main benefit of Ajax is a greatly improved user experience. Although JavaScript and DHTML—the technical foundations of Ajax—have been available for years, most programmers ignored them because they were difficult to master. Today, frameworks written in JavaScript, such as Dojo, can help you build Ajax applications, but you still need a good understanding of JavaScript in order to use them. Google offers another way to help Java developers create Ajax applications more productively. This new framework, called Google Web Toolkit (GWT), can be used efficiently with Oracle JDeveloper. GWT is freely available under the Apache License v. 2.0 at http://code.google.com/webtoolkit.

...read ful article at http://www.oracle.com/technology/pub/articles/dubois-gwt.html

Oracle's Security Blanket

Oracle has a two-pronged strategy that includes standalone products and security built into its next-generation Fusion applications.

Oracle may not TOP the list of security vendors, but it's working hard to get there. It won't be easy, considering stiff competition from CA, IBM, Sun, and others.

Oracle's two-pronged strategy, outlined last week by co-president Charles Phillips and other executives, focuses on products for data encryption, access control, and identity management, and on adding built-in security features to its next-generation application suite, Fusion.

Last year, Oracle purchased three companies specializing in security. Its plan for Fusion applications, due starting in 2008, is to provide a single Web interface that gives access to ERP, financial, human resources, and other apps woven together by a service-oriented architecture. Oracle plans to have its security technology working behind the scenes to ensure that users will only have access to data and applications in Fusion that they're authorized to get.

Oracle already offers security software that lets database customers encrypt data, protect it from unauthorized access, and assign appropriate security levels. It also offers identity management capabilities that can be used on non-Oracle systems, including directory services, user authentication, Web services access control, and single sign-on for multiple apps. Auditing and compliance apps also are part of Oracle's security arsenal.

Oracle's competitors are wise to the importance of integrated security. IBM recently acquired Internet Security Systems, and EMC plans to acquire RSA Security. Oracle archrival SAP prefers to partner for security capabilities, as it did last month with Breach Security, which makes software for inspecting network traffic protected by Secure Sockets Layer.

Oracle can't afford not to make security part of its future application portfolio. As for standalone products, it's competing in an increasingly noisy market.

Integrate OracleAS 10g with E-Business Suite Release 11

Integrate OracleAS 10g with E-Business Suite Release 11

It is now possible to integrate the E-Business Suite Release 11i with OracleAS 10g, for the use of Single Sign-On, Oracle Internet Directory, Portal, Discoverer, Web Cache and Oracle Integration.

Integrated, Not Upgraded

The key concept is that Release 11i may be integrated with OracleAS 10g. The existing E-Business Suite application server, Oracle9i Application Server 1.0.2.2.2, is not upgraded to OracleAS 10g; the two instances are integrated together in a loosely-coupled architecture like this:



Remember that if you want to upgrade your existing E-Business Suite 9iAS application server to OracleAS 10g, you'll be able to do that in Release 12. For Release 11i, it's always going to be an integration-based architecture.

One Server or Two?

The diagram above shows the existing E-Business Suite 9iAS services and the new external OracleAS 10g services running on two different physical servers. That's Oracle's recommended configuration, particularly if we are planning to upgrade from Discoverer 4i to 10g (due to the former's obsolescence in Oct 2006).

It's possible to install OracleAS 10g on the same physical server where 9iAS is installed... if you have sufficient resources available on that box. You must install OracleAS 10g in a separate ORACLE_HOME. OracleAS 10g cannot be installed into the existing E-Business Suite 9iAS ORACLE_HOME.

What Are The Main OracleAS 10g Components?

Architecturally, you should think of OracleAS 10g as being comprised of middle-tier (application tier) products and infrastructure services. Middle-tier products include Portal, Discoverer, and Oracle Integration.

The OracleAS 10g Infrastructure includes Single Sign-On, Oracle Internet Directory, and the actual LDAP database where user credentials are stored. In general, all of the OracleAS 10g middle-tier products share the same OracleAS 10g Infrastructure.

Middle-tier products like Portal have content such as portal page definitions, pictures, downloadable files, and so on. This content has metadata, too, which determines how content is displayed and accessed. All of this product-specific content and metadata is stored in a database called the OracleAS 10g Metadata Repository.

Installing OracleAS 10g (Over and Over)

As you'd expect, there are several variants of how these components can be installed. These variants are documented in excruciating detail in the OracleAS 10g Installation Guide for each operating system platform. Arm yourself with coffee before reading the Installation Guide - it can be heavy going for a first-time reader.

In general, the first component to be installed is the OracleAS 10g Infrastructure. If you're starting out simply (which I'd recommend), you can install the OracleAS 10g Metadata Repository at the same time, like this:



Advanced sysadmins have the option of installing the Infrastructure and Metadata Repository in different places and on different servers, like this:



If all you're interested in using is Single Sign-On and Oracle Internet Directory with the E-Business Suite, you're done on that front (for now).

If you're interested in using Portal or other middle-tier components like Oracle Integration, you need to run the Oracle Unversal Installer and install those components separately. As part of their installation, you'll need to point those components to the OracleAS 10g Infrastructure and OracleAS 10g Metadata Repository that you created earlier.

OracleAS 10g Runs Independently

Now that your OracleAS 10g environment is installed, you should test it to ensure that it runs without any issues. You should be able to log in to this environment, create and modify users, start up Portal, create custom portal home pages, and so on.

Connecting OracleAS 10g to the E-Business Suite

Once your OracleAS 10g instance is proven to be working, you will proceed with connecting it to your E-Business Suite environment. Doing so will enable your E-Business Suite to use Single Sign-On, Portal, and Discoverer services running on the OracleAS 10g instance.

Introduction to the Google Web Toolkit

Learn how to use the Google Web Toolkit to do everything from basic tasks to advanced ones such as RPC communication, history management, and packaging a production-ready application.

Web 2.0 and its technical counterpart, Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax), are gaining momentum thanks to applications such as Gmail and Google Maps. For Web applications, the main benefit of Ajax is a greatly improved user experience. Although JavaScript and DHTML—the technical foundations of Ajax—have been available for years, most programmers ignored them because they were difficult to master. Today, frameworks written in JavaScript, such as Dojo, can help you build Ajax applications, but you still need a good understanding of JavaScript in order to use them. Google offers another way to help Java developers create Ajax applications more productively. This new framework, called Google Web Toolkit (GWT), can be used efficiently with Oracle JDeveloper. GWT is freely available under the Apache License v. 2.0 at http://code.google.com/webtoolkit.

Main Features and Restrictions

One of the main problems with Ajax development is that you need to master a large stack of heterogeneous technologies. Depending on the nature of your project (for example, business applications), this can be a great drawback.

In addition, different Web browsers don’t support JavaScript and DHTML in the same way. For example, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox handle these technologies slightly differently; you’ll need to deal with this if you want your application to run seamlessly on your users’ PCs.

Although most of the Ajax frameworks available today simplify development work, you still need a good grasp of the technology stack. So, if you’re planning to use Ajax to improve only your application’s user experience—if you’re not also using it as a strategic advantage for your business—it may be unwise to spend a lot of money and time on the technology.

GWT proposes a different way to create Ajax applications. It uses Java as a single programming language for both the client and server sides. Is it the return of Java applets? Not at all: GWT provides a compiler that translates the Java code on the client side into JavaScript and DTHML. This solution greatly simplifies the technology stack from the programmer’s point of view: You have to master only Java. The downside is that you have less control over the client-side code of your application because it’s eventually generated by the GWT compiler.

The Java code for the client side of your application is subject to restrictions because JavaScript doesn’t implement the entire object-oriented concepts and APIs available in Java. You can use only a subset of Java keywords and APIs (java.lang and java.util):

• All the primitive types (such as byte, char, short, and int) as well as their corresponding classes (such as Byte and Char) are directly supported—except for long, which is translated into the JavaScript equivalent of double. It is recommended that you use int instead of long.
• User-defined exceptions (checked or not) are possible but the method Throwable.getStackTrace() is not available. Some JVM exceptions are also available (such as IndexOutOfBoundException).
• The keyword synchronized has no effect because JavaScript is mono-thread. The multithread API is not available.
• Reflection is not supported. However, you can get the class name of an object by using the method GWT.getTypeName(Object).
• Finalization is not supported.
• Several objects containers from java.util can be used, such as Stack, Vector, and HashMap. The Date class is also available.

In addition, GWT provides specific APIs to manage the GUI, internationalization, and XML parsing. It also provides a comprehensive library to manage communication between the client and the server. It uses well-known Remote Procedure Call (RPC) principles implemented by a generic servlet (RemoteServiceServlet), which you can specialize for your own needs. You also can use JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) as the data interchange format for your HTTP messages sent with the GWT HTTPRequest class.

GWT also offers an interface, called JavaScript Native Interface (JSNI), which lets you mix your own hand-made JavaScript code with the code generated by the GWT compiler. JSNI uses the keyword native used by Java Native Interface (JNI) to define your own JavaScript functions. The body of these functions is defined inside specifically formatted comments.

Finally, you can unit-test your code inside JDeveloper with GWTTestCase, a specialization of the class TestCase provided by JUnit.

Focus on GUI Programming with GWT

Ajax dramatically changes the way you develop Web applications. Most of the time, an Ajax application needs only a single Web page. Its content is modified dynamically by JavaScript and DHTML to produce a user experience similar to that provided by native applications.

Therefore, GWT provides a programming model whose principles will sound familiar to Swing or AWT programmers. The GUI is no longer specified by HTML tags as in classic Web applications. It’s programmed directly with Java code in a way similar to AWT or Swing. The well-known concepts of GUI programming are available with GWT:

• Widgets, including the usual items (such as Button, TextBox, and CheckBox) and more advanced items such as Tree and Menu Bar
• Panels, which contain widgets, with their own layout (panels and layout aren’t separated as in Swing)
• Events generated by widgets. The listeners must implement specific interfaces.

Loading the GWT JavaScript library and specifying the entry point of your application is easy: all you have to do is create a simple HTML page.

GWT uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Every widget has its own style, which you can change to meet your needs. You must create your own CSS to overload the defaults defined by GWT.

If the standard widgets don’t suit your needs, you can also define your own. (This topic, however, is beyond the scope of this article.)

Fusion Applications - Bits and Pieces of Future Direction

While I believe this information to be reliable, please insert the appropriate legal boilerplate: these thoughts are my own and do not represent those of Oracle; while I believe this information to be accurate, I do not present them with the intent that any person or enterprise to rely on this content to their detriment, the author accepts no personal liability, blah…blah…blah…

Now that the CYA is finished, let’s get on with sharing the news.

Release 12

R12 of the E-Business Suite is, to a large degree, a delivery iteration on the path to Fusion Applications. Although we all already know that R12 will run on Fusion Middleware, I’m not sure we all understand that one of the major points of R12 is to extend the functionality of the E-Business Suite using Fusion Middleware. In other words, this might be a worthwhile release for those E-Business customers ready to dive deeper into SOA.

Fusion Applications

- Oracle Forms will be replaced by Java Server Faces (”JSF”)
- The combination of Business Process tools and a BPEL execution environment will replace the Oracle Workflow product
- Fusion 1.0 will not eliminate PL/SQL and C++ from the apps environment, but the intent is for both to be eliminated at some point
- The Fusion development effort is still on-track to release individual applications in 2007 and the integrated Fusion Applications Suite in 2008.
- Oracle has released their flavor of an SOA maturity model, which you can read about here. This model provides substantial insight on where Fusion is headed.
- JDeveloper with ADF will continue to be the IDE and framework of choice for development work within the Fusion Applications environment.

Well, that’s all I have for now. Like I stated earlier, it’s in bits and pieces. There is not much of a unifying thread running through all this, it’s just chunks of info that seem worthy of sharing.

In-Depth: Using Portal 10g with the E-Business Suite

In-Depth: Using Portal 10g with the E-Business Suite

This article covers the use of Oracle Portal 10g (10.1.2.0.2) with the E-Business Suite

The Basics: Portal Pages and EBS Product Portlets

Portal 10g is Oracle's enterprise portal product, allowing users to create web sites that consolidate and publish information from a variety of sources. Oracle's corporate website is built with Portal:

Portal users can access the E-Business Suite via the Application Navigator, a small portlet that displays a hierarchical menu of an authenticated user's Applications Responsibilities and their associated menu items. Here's a screenshot of the Applications Navigator:

Here's a screenshot of the draft Release 12 equivalent, with Applications Favorites portlet thrown in at no extra charge:



The Applications Navigator portlet's menu is user-specific: only the responsibilities that the user is authorized [link] for are displayed, so every user will see a different menu. The Navigator menu provide access to all E-Business Suite content, including Self-Service web-based applications like iExpenses, as well as Forms and Discoverer workbooks.

Other portlets are available for:

• Application Favorites A list of bookmarked links to specific E-Business Suite screens

• Applications Worklist A list of the user's Workflow Notifications

• Balanced Scorecard Graphical and tabular key performance indicators based on E-Business Suite data

What's Required to Do This?

You need to do the following to use Portal with the E-Business Suite:

1. Integrate the E-Business Suite with Single Sign-On 10g (this is a mandatory prerequisite)
   
   
2. Install the E-Business Suite Oracle Applications Framework Web Provider in your E-Business Suite environment
   
   
3. Register the E-Business Suite Web Provider in your Portal environment
   
   
4. Build a custom portal page that displays the E-Business Suite portlets of your choice
   

How Does the Integration Work?

Individual E-Business Suite applications such as Balanced Scorecard write portlets to expose their data in Portal. These portlets communicate with Portal via the Oracle Applications Framework (OAF) web provider, a small E-Business Suite technology stack plug-in that handles user session management and transmission of portal content on-demand.

A Flurry of Activity

Here's what happens behind the scenes to produce a portal page containing an E-Business Suite portlet:

An end-user navigates to Portal. If the user isn't already logged in, she's redirected to Single Sign-On, where she's logged in. Once properly authenticated, she's redirected back to Portal.

The Portal Parallel Page Engine (PPE) begins assembling the home page that the user will eventually see, dispatching requests to the various sources for the latest office gossip, stock quotes, Discoverer workbook portlets, and so on.

Portal notes that the end-user's home page includes the Applications Navigator. Portal calls the OAF web provider, requesting the data for that portlet.

The OAF web provider looks up the user's authorization and then passes control to the portlet code that actually retrieves the data from the E-Business Suite database. That data is sent back to Portal, which renders the portlet according to wrapper information provided by the OAF web provider.


Certification with Portal 10.1.4

The latest version of Portal 10g available at the time of this post is Portal 10.1.4. This version is still being certified with the E-Business Suite.